Colour Japanese style full sleeve tattoo of koi fish, waves and cherry blossom covering the upper arm and shoulder.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Koi and wave full sleeve

Japanese · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A full sleeve tattoo shown in three views covers the shoulder and upper arm, with a blue koi fish near the shoulder and an orange koi lower down the arm. Cherry blossom sprigs, falling petals and grey-brown wave forms surround the fish, with smooth shading that gives the water depth. Bright orange, blue and pink ink stand out against the soft grey and brown shading of the waves and background, and the composition wraps around the arm.

Japanese Upper arm Shoulder Koi Fish Wave Cherry blossom Petal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The pond behind the milking parlour froze solid the week after Grandad died, and I was the only one who thought to break the ice. Dad said the fish would be fine. Grandad always said they were tougher than the cows, and he was right about most things that didn't involve the tractor.

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I took the hand axe down to the water at first light, my breath going up in clouds. Under the grey sheet I could see them: a blue one as long as my forearm, fins fanned out like the hands of a stopped clock, and the old orange one Grandad called Mrs Hadley because she had never once let him catch her. Frost ferns grew across the glass. I chipped a hole the size of a dinner plate and crouched there until my knees ached, watching them drift up to breathe.

He had brought the koi back from a nursery in Leeds the year my mother was born, and the cherry tree by the gate from a cutting he'd nursed on a windowsill for three winters. Nobody on the farm understood why a man who bought seed potatoes by the sack would fuss over a pink-flowered sapling. I understood it a little now. He had been keeping something alive that didn't need to be useful.

By April the blossom came out all at once, the way it does, and the wind carried it across the yard and down onto the water. I stood at the edge with the axe handle still in my hand. Mrs Hadley rose through a drift of petals, slow and deliberate, and opened her mouth at the surface as though she had something to tell me and was too polite to say it.